J.P. Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon Regrets Calling Bitcoin a ‘Fraud’


J.P. Morgan Chief Executive Jamie Dimon has publicly admitted that he regrets calling bitcoin a ‘fraud’ in his interview on Fox Business on Tuesday. Although Dimon has change his mind about bitcoin and blockchain technology, the CEO added that he still is not interested in the cryptocurrency at all:

“The blockchain is real. You can have cryptodollars in yen and stuff like that. ICOs … you got to look at every one individually. The bitcoin was always to me what the governments are going to feel about bitcoin when it gets really big. And I just have a different opinion than other people.”

Surprisingly, how Jamie Dimon’s latest comment about bitcoin differs from his previous words, when he called bitcoin a fraud at a bank investor conference in New York in September 2017:

“The currency isn’t going to work. You can’t have a business where people can invent a currency out of thin air and think that people who are buying it are really smart… If you’re stupid enough to buy it, you’ll pay the price for it one day.”

This Jamie Dimon’s statement became the most outspoken critics of Bitcoin on Wall Street ever. Although he was not the only one to criticize the cryptocurrency, all the other negative comments, as, for instance, Ray Dalio’s calling bitcoin a ‘bubble’, were much less aggressive.

Moreover, J.P. Morgan Chase Chief Executive spoke about Silicon Valley’s startups as new rivals that are “looking to compete with banks.” Dimon’s words had brought about lots of discussions and were even challenged by Bitcoin cloud mining provider, Genesis Mining, which launched a mobile billboard campaign targeted at JP Morgan CEO.

Despite such steadfastly sceptical attitude and Dimon’s promise to fire anyone working for J.P. Morgan, who would be caught investing in Bitcoin, the bank didn’t stop moving towards new technologies and considered allowing its clients to trade bitcoin futures.

As practice shows, even those investors and bank chiefs, who have always stayed negative to cryptocurrencies, admit blockchain to be a promising way to speed up payments and contracts. And now, when the most vigorous critic has publicly changed his mind, it’s another demonstration of the technology’s worthiness.

Blockchain technology eliminates any need for a third party intermediary by creating a permanent, open record of all transactions on a network. It allows buyers and sellers to interact directly, while their exchange is recorded on the blockchain ledger.

J.P. Morgan Chase announced in October the launch of a blockchain-based system that will significantly reduce the number of parties needed to verify global payments, reducing transaction times from weeks to hours. Royal Bank of Canada and Australia and New Zealand Banking Group are the bank’s partners in the project, called the Interbank Information Network.

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